After a very early flight this morning I made it into Tampa, FL this afternoon. Loving the weather, hopefully it’s a little sunnier tomorrow though. I’m in town for the Back in Black 2 T-Shirt Exhibit which is going down this Saturday (May 16th) at Czar’s in Tampa (Ybor City). I’ll be playing a Tycho/ISO50 live set around midnight to cap the event off.
The event will feature special limited edition shirts from several artists including myself. You can check out all the shirts here, they’re only available through the end of the month so get yours while they last. The shirts can be had for $25 online and $20 at the event.
Update: Congrats to the big winners: Luci (Lucizzle), Rob (norby), and Bill (serrano). You’ve all been contacted, let me know via the contact page if you don’t get the email.
Last night I hit the publish button on the Buamai post then glanced at the overall post count and noticed it read 999. So that would make this the 1000th post on the ISO50 Blog. Pretty amazing, I never would have guessed the number was that high. I am really good at missing milestones (birthdays, weddings, holidays, anniversaries, etc..) and somehow I missed it when the blog turned 1 year old. So I’m glad I caught this one, seems like a nice round number to celebrate.
I want to sincerely thank everyone who has visited, commented, and supported over the past few years. It’s been an incredible learning experience for me and I’ve really enjoyed hearing all of your thoughts on the various subjects we post on. I originally started the blog simply because I wanted an easier way to update the small news section that was on the old ISO50.com, but since then it’s grown far beyond that initial scope. I can’t say for sure what the next 1,000 will bring, but there are a lot more upgrades and features coming, along with all the usual posts and music, so stick around!
So now on to the festivities: Drop a line in the comments, then sign up for the RSS Feed or the Newsletter and you’ll be entered to win 3 shirts, 3 posters, and a CD of your choice from the ISO50 Shop (be sure to include an email so we can track you down if you win). If you’re already a subscriber, then just add a comment and you’re set. Two runners-up will get 1 shirt, 1 poster, and a CD. The winners will be chosen from the comments at random in a week (May 20th).
So again, thank you all for your support, it’s always appreciated. I also want to thank Jakub, Alex, Beamer, and Sam for all their great posts, you guys are always on point! And as always, I value your opinions so please feel free to take this as an opportunity to make any suggestions or maybe just list your all-time favorite post(s).
Update: Thanks everyone for the kind words! I’ve been on the road so been hard to get the drawing done, thanks for your patience. I will pick a winner today hopefully and get in touch.
Social image bookmarking sites are a dime a dozen these days (think ffffound, Dropular, and their ilk) but Buamai takes the concept to a new level. The brainchild of Michael Paul Young (co-creator of Youworkforthem), Buamai has thus far kept their contributor list closed — something I think is a must if you’re going to keep quality up. It seems that free-for-all sites’ content suffers incrementally as their user count rises. Buamai also has some novel sorting features along with the “Destoy” and “Mutate” options that make for some interesting modes of discovery. Here’s to hoping for an invitation. Buamai
Do you ever feel like I post too much electronic music? do you ever look at my post and just past by it and put on The Decemberist on? well here is my attempt to make your ears smile.
This summer has alot of promise here in Brooklyn, i’m looking forward to a lot of bands to come thru and blow me away, one in particular is the Harlem Shakes, they maybe my New Villager or your Clap Your Hands Say Yeah or your friends Passion Pit, listen and let me know what you think.
Deastro will be playing a few shows i’m sure with Tycho this year besides just the Detroit and Toronto shows coming up. Randy Chabot is a great if not amazing stage presents when you first see him perform. His sound for Vermillion Plaza is like a young U2 meets the soundtrack to Sonic the Hedgehog(specifically that 3D tube level where you run with tails…blah you might not know what I mean). Either way this band has epic talent and their Moondagger LP will be one that will be remembered on Ghostly’s release catalog.
New Dinosaur Jr. is hitting the record store shelves and all I want to do is listen to Feel The Pain.
When Tortoise comes to mind all I can think about is 3 things: First is fatty synth magic and second is there drummer can’t be a real person and third I remember the first time I saw the drummer play for Prefuse 73 in Detroit years ago and he was soo on point that he literally played one of the most complex parts i’ve seen him play all night while directing, pointing and yelling at the sound guy to the point that playing the song was 3rd on his priority list but still killed it, pure talent in my opinion, oh yeah and the rest of the band is good too.
I’ve been following Dan McPharlin’s work for a few years now, ever since his miniature synthesizer models started showing up on Matrixsynth. I fell in love with his perfectly crafted, perfectly photographed (seriously, the photography is almost cooler than the work itself) paper music machines. But after being introduced to his graphic/illustration work he quickly became one of my favorite artists. His illustrations are very reminiscent of another favorite of mine, Roger Dean, and are evocative of that prog-rock driven 70’s sci-fi art scene that, when done right, is just downright incredible.
So it’s been great to see Dan’s work start popping up all over the place, like here, here (Prefuse 73 cover), and here (Jakub, you really should have know better!). Beyond the visual beauty of his work, it’s just great to see someone being creative with such a novel medium. He brings the mind and eye of a designer to a world previously reserved for 60-somethings hiding out in their basements building model railroads. To see him wrap all this up and successfully translate that future-past-that-never-was aesthetic into commercial projects is a good thing indeed.
You can check out more of Dan’s work at his flickr.
On a side note, he’s posted some shots of his home/work-space here. Are you kidding? Amazing. My house looks like it was built of scraps from a 19th-century Troller Boat that ran aground in front of a hippie commune. Seriously, parts of a boat were used in the construction of this house, I am sure of it. Anyways, I am disorganized at best, slovenly at worst and I don’t think I have the skill set to keep such a meticulously minimalist situation like that up for any length of time. If I win the lottery I will get one of those modernist prefabs and put it in front of this house. I’ll then carefully place completely unusable angular furniture and German-designed objects all around it. Finally I will place a single synthesizer with wooden endbells and an analog sequencer on a white table with a molded plywood chair in front of it. When people come over I will tell them that’s where I get all my work done and then I will sit them down at a walnut coffee table with various important looking design books stacked neatly on top of it and expound on typography theory and then chastise them for not understanding the difference between kerning and leading. After they leave I will go back to my real house and eat a sandwich in my basement and watch Adult Swim and then not clean up the plate for a week or so.
The May edition of the ISO50/Tycho newsletter is out! You can view it here. If you’d like to receive them automatically, you can sign up here.
Also a quick correction. If you received the email version of the newsletter, some of the dates for the upcoming Tycho shows were wrong, here are the correct dates:
It’s hard to believe, but somehow my spring semester is coming to a close this week. The film festival project, which I’ve written aboutpreviously, finally has all pieces completed and accounted for. The last element added into the mix was a festival trailer (shown above). Originally, I planned to create a few more ancillary products to flesh out the brand, but these fell through and I had to move on the trailer option late in the game. I teamed up with my friend Phil Mills, a local actor here in San Francisco, and we set about writing, shooting, and editing the film last Sunday afternoon.
We were allowed to base the trailer on just about anything we wanted, so long as it advertised our hypothetical film festival and carried through the visual style of our brand. There were a multitude of directions this could take; we thought the most fun way would be to shoot a Royal Tenenbaums-esque short, and then just throw as much craziness as we could at it. Phil plays T. Allen Fenway, a fictional character we made up to live in our Wes Anderson film festival world. We wanted it to remind you of Wes Anderson, make you laugh, and eventually turn you on to the festival. The 3rd person narrator, use of Futura Bold for all titles, extravagant setting, and full blown randomness were all utilized to aid in conjuring this look and feel.
The equipment for this project was sort of all over the place. I luckily had a video camera lying around (usually relegated to filming stationary Youtube videos) and I figured I might as well take it out for a real test drive on this project. I used the Panasonic PV-GS250; an older handheld consumer camcorder that doesn’t have much in the way of image quality, especially compared to the newer HD models. I considered renting a Panasonic HPX-170, but was deterred by the expensive daily rental rate. I figured I’d make it work with the little guy and try my best to fix things up in post. I had also recently purchased a continuous tungsten lighting kit and this helped with the indoor shots greatly. (I am planning to do a post on video lighting after some more tests.)
I edited this project using iMovie ’08, the disastrous upgrade to iMovie HD. I had never used the upgrade before and was very disappointed to find that the program had basically been downgraded into an almost unusable trainwreck. (No waveform mixing!?) I had to stick with it, for the increased flexibility with titles, but it was not a pretty sight. Once the project was edited and all cut together, I procured Final Cut Pro (sadly too late to edit with) and Color. I sent the final output through Color and it was a great help in getting the trailer to look the way it does. Color is an amazing application and I feel like I just scratched the surface of its capability. It basically provides the same color editing functionality you have in Photoshop for still images, but for video. I worked on each shot individually, and first tried to clean up the stale color the camcorder captured, and then tweak it just enough to provide that timelessness of Wes Anderson films. Of course, the program’s power is limited by the image quality of the camera, so some edits weren’t possible without destroying the integrity of the image. (Exposure or saturation edits for example looked terrible.) The basic color editing functions (below) were enough to give the final product the look I was hoping for.
I had done a few test shots and some basic story-boarding prior to the shoot, but we were pretty much shooting from the hip the whole time. Phil is a great actor and he knew exactly what I was going for with this project. As we are both avid Wes Anderson fans, we didn’t have to do too much in the way of research or planning prior to the shoot. The order in which we completed the trailer was probably completely backwards (we wrote it after we shot it) but it ended up working out and provided us with many a happy accident. Despite the fact that this part of the project was not “graphic” design in the traditional sense, it was definitely the most fun, and my favorite part of the semester.
I feel like we need a good dose of funk and soul sometimes on this blog and Monday couldn’t be a better day for it. This weekend I went to see the Stones Throw Label Showcase at Le Poisson Rouge featuring Dam Funk and James Pants, the crowd was pretty good given the fact they played the Natural History Museum the night before. Dam Funk really stuck out for me as a DJ, he kept the crowd in it by singing over every track and his personality was something you could never hate, he only wanted everyone to have a good time. Below is a super raw mix but the tracklisting is pure class, enjoy.
TRACKLIST
1.THE ANTILLES – “I’ve Got To Have You” :: Creole / ‘83
2.GODMOMA – “Godmoma Here” :: Elektra / ‘81
3.CIRCLE CITY BAND – “Magic” (instr ver.) :: Circle City / ‘83
4.UNO – “Boogie Beat” :: Tryon Park / ‘80
5.RAH BAND – “Messages From The Stars” :: TMT / ‘83
6.SIDE ON – “Magic” :: Beggars Banquet / ‘83
7.SAVANNA – “Never Let You Go” :: R&B / ‘82
8.ZALMAC – “I Get Down” :: TSOB / ‘82
9.VAUGHAN MASON featuring BUTCH DAYO – “You Can Do It” (instr. ver.) :: Salsoul / ‘83
10.WIZARD – “It’s On” :: Chocolate Cholly’s / ‘82
11.GASTON – “Everywhere a Funk, Funk” :: Chocolate Cholly’s / ‘81
12.CAROL CHINNETE w/ The Concrete Band – “Cyanide Love” :: Zilco / ‘84
13.AARON BROOMFIELD – “Polyphase (Instrumental Poly Rythums) :: Mountain / ‘83
14.*WYND CHYMES – “Baby You’re The One” :: Shakin’ / ‘80 (*’D-F’; The 1st selector on the west-coast, maybe all of the U.S., to play this particular ‘original press’ rare 45″ out!)
15.INDEX – “Starlight (The Break)” :: Record Shack of London / ‘81
16.FIREFLY – “Show Me Tonight” :: Emergency / ‘82
17.NEXUS – “Stand Up” (instr. ver) :: Mr. Disc / ‘83
18.JAMES PANTS – “Ka$h” (instr. ver.) :: Stones Throw / ‘07
19.THE VERDICT – “That’s Where I Come In” :: Nuance / ‘8?
20.PEE WEE – “Be My Girl” :: Streetwise / ‘82
21.BARON ZEN – “Burn Rubber” (dãm-funk Remix / instr. ver.) :: Stones Throw / ‘07
